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Weiser gives Big 12 a voice

Former K-State athletic director Tim Weiser's voice will be heard this year as the chairman of the NCAA selection committee will be allowed to speak when Big 12 teams are considered.

MANHATTAN — When it comes to the NCAA baseball tournament selections, Kansas State and other Big 12 Conference teams could have an influential voice presenting their case.
Tim Weiser, the former K-State athletic director, is deputy commissioner of the Big 12 and serves as chairman of the NCAA selection committee. And unlike past years, conference representatives this year will not have to abstain from any discussions of their own teams.
Just this week, the 10-member committee made up of athletic directors, conference commissioners, coaches and other administrators, completed the first of a series of conference calls.
The committee will gather Memorial Day weekend in Indianapolis to select teams and assign them to regional sites.
Each member of the committee was assigned to focus on a geographic region throughout the season. Weiser was assigned to the Midwest and is in charge of the Big 12, Missouri Valley Conference and Horizon League.
“We’ll talk with coaches that represent each of those leagues about teams they’ve played in the league and teams they’ve played out of league that should be under consideration,” Weiser said by phone Tuesday. “As the opportunity presents, depending on where each of us are located, we’ll go out and watch teams play.”
Weiser already has attended several Big 12 games this season and has been impressed.
“We’ve got an incredibly deep conference this year,” he said. “The one team that’s mathematically eliminated is Nebraska, and year in and year out Nebraska is always a great baseball program. They just had a down year this year.
“The other teams in our league, they’re all still playing for the opportunity to get to the postseason tournament or the opportunity to get to the conference tournament.
“Boy, there’s lots of depth, more than I’ve seen in my years of watching Big Eight and Big 12 baseball.”
In past years, conference commissioners would have to leave the room when their conference affiliation came up in the selection room. However, that has changed, meaning Weiser will be able to sit in on meetings when teams from the Big 12 are discussed, giving the conference an added voice in the selection process.
“We talked about that last year,” Weiser said. “One of our committee members was the AD at Mississippi State, and he was in a position where he couldn’t talk about Mississippi State, but he certainly could talk about LSU and other teams affiliated with the SEC. But when it came to my discussions, I couldn’t talk about any of our teams, so I felt like that was a distinct disadvantage for those people that were in conference positions.
“We discussed it and agreed that we have enough faith in each other and trust that we are gonna talk through these things and discuss and argue all the way through it.”
The process of selecting the 64-team field is similar to the NCAA selection process for college basketball. The committee looks at a team’s RPI, how it is playing down the stretch, road wins and so on.
“The truth is for the seven or eight years that I’ve been doing this, it will continue to be an art, rather than a science,” Weiser said. “I tell our coaches this every year that we undoubtedly leave out teams that are deserving of making it to the NCAA. It’s just the nature of the process.
“Just like in men’s basketball — because you’ve got the automatic bids where conferences are going to send their champion, and in many cases that champion probably won’t be at the same level as a six-, seven-, eighth- or ninth-place team in another conference, that bumps some of those kinds of teams out of the opportunity to compete.
“I feel quite confident every year there are teams that deserve to be in that we just don’t have slots available to put them in.”